As mobile devices become increasingly prevalent, users' reliance on mobile devices for various tasks increases accordingly. For example, mobile devices are frequently relied upon for telephony, electronic messaging, etc. Because of this reliance on mobile devices, mobile service providers have an interest in providing high quality of service (hereinafter “QoS”), and timely resolution of any QoS-related incidents. For example, a cellular service provider may have an interest in maintaining a minimum uptime percentage, a minimum coverage area, or any other cellular QoS-related metric. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that many different types of mobile service providers exist (e.g., telephony, electronic messaging, multimedia messaging, etc.), and many different types of QoS-related concerns (e.g., storage space, bandwidth utilization, computational overhead, disconnections, network traversal flow, packet loss, location tracking, call blocking, handoff blocking, etc.) exist.
To quickly determine when QoS-related issues arise, mobile service providers may monitor individual devices being serviced. For example, an Internet-connected personal digital assistant (PDA) may be monitored for latency, bandwidth usage, uptime, or any other aspect of the PDA. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that many different types of mobile devices exist, and many different aspects of a mobile device may be monitored.
When monitoring a mobile device, data retrieved from the mobile device may be analyzed, to identify information that may indicate a QoS-related issue. For example, a sharp increase in downtime may indicate a network failure, or a sharp decrease in response time may indicate network congestion. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that many different types of analysis may be performed.
Typically, to monitor mobile devices on a network, a global monitoring host is communicatively coupled with the mobile devices. The global monitoring host issues monitoring requests directly to the mobile devices. In response to the monitoring requests, the mobile devices transmit monitoring-related data directly to the global monitoring host. The global monitoring host then analyzes the transmitted data to identify any potential QoS-related issues. If a potential issue is identified, the global monitoring host may take an appropriate action, e.g., initiate a helpdesk ticket, modify a QoS-related system setting, etc. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that many different responses to a possible QoS-related issue exist.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that in the system described above, the global monitoring host is a central point of failure. Specifically, if the global monitoring host fails, then no monitoring of the mobile devices is possible. Further, those skilled in the art will appreciate that as the number of mobile devices being monitored increases, so does the amount of network traffic around the global monitoring host, which may result in network congestion. Thus, network bandwidth constraints may limit the number of mobile devices that the global monitoring host can monitor. Additionally, those skilled in the art will appreciate that as the number of mobile devices being monitored increases, so does the processing power required of the global monitoring host. Thus, processing constraints may limit the number of mobile devices that the global monitoring host can monitor.